Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): "My beloved...I love you as a best friend and the most precious brother my dear.

If you are fine, I would be happy for you, and if you are living in difficult conditions, you can overcome all problems with shrewdness, patience and wisdom.

As for my situation, after resorting to endurance and patience, I realized that I have to trick my conscious mind and my subconscious that I have to forget all my natural human needs, including hunger.

And to try to imitate the survival skills of some living organisms per the theory of adaptation. These words are emerging from my heart and my emotions regarding the daily life I am live...

My dear brother and friend, I am seriously using all my natural and inherited strength, and all the optimistic cells in my body and soul to make up a fictitious or real image that would enable me overcome the hardships. Life experiences teach us, but they are harsh."

Today 2/12/2018

At 8:35 AM

This is a letter written by a youth behind bars, who was sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence, over a politically-motivated case, to his brother who emigrated from Bahrain fearing arrest over same politically motivated charges, while their third brother is also serving a lengthy prison term, over similar charges as well.

The three sons left their mother. She no longer has a son whom she can depend on in the years she has left of her life. This has become the case of Bahrainis; from prisoners, immigrants, displaced and pursued people to the persecuted. All of them have to use everything they can in their power in order to adapt to the reality they have to live in and deal with, even if this reality went beyond what a human could endure.

No one can understand the pain in this letter unless they have witnessed the harsh experience in Bahraini prisons and the long-years they spend that are eaten out of their lives. No one can understand this patience that he described in the letter, unless one experienced the harshness of torture he was subjected to make a written confession by force, or the ill-treatment, hunger, deprivation, humiliation and harassment he had to endure. No one would know what he means by patience if he didn't experience the patience experienced over the loss of a mother, father, wife and children, over losing the smile of his youngest child, over the fact of not being able to drive your son on his first day of school... Necessary human needs become a luxury and a figment of wild imagination in prison.

What does "forget all my innate human needs, including hunger" mean? How can you be forced to forget your basic innate needs, this requires you to forget that you are human in the first place, as the human being does not live without his simple innate and natural needs; however, the Bahraini authorities continue to make you forget your humanity until it turns you from a creature of instinct into a broken creature. They want to take away from you the feeling of life itself. They want you to become down, desperate and miserable.

Your body will have to adapt to the hunger that grows more in the emptiness, the food that becomes only a way to save you from death rather from filling a need. It is not enough to tolerate the poor quality of food provided to you, but also get used its unavailability at times. You have to adapt to food running out before your hungry body feels sufficient, and you will not be allowed to buy enough extra food from the prison store even on your own account.

Your icy body in winter will have to bathe in cold water, after Jaw Prison administration decides to turn off the hot water as it does at the beginning of every winter. You will have to adapt like an animal, to withstand the cold water that feels like electricity on your body. You will have to writhe from the cold after your winter clothes are confiscated, and you do not find what warms you up.

You will have to adapt to the panic that occurs in the middle of the night whenever the prison security forces raid the cell and force you to wake up and take you out into the hall under the pretext of making a search.

You will have to adapt to drinking water in detergent (Clorox) and (Flash) bottles, and heat the food in bags and plastic boxes you find in the trash. You have to adapt to living in the cemetery of the living called Bahrain prisons, and to use all your innate and acquired energies, and every cell of optimism in your heart, in order to remain alive despite death itself.

Arabic Version